Untitled (profound context)

TW: Claustrophobic vibes, implied body horror, can be interpreted as a metaphor for suicide.

The door of the apartment slams into the wall as I run panting into the entryway. The five-block sprint left me out of breath in a way I do not want to acknowledge. Oh, how the mighty fall from their days of high school track and field.

I look wildly around, head snapping from side to side, eyes darting to take in the sea of green that greets me. My sister's apartment has been swallowed in plants, every inch subsumed with life. The air is thick and damp, like the rain forest greenhouse I once went to on a school trip. For a split second all I can think of is what a perfect environment for mold spores this must be. A low, broken groan echos through the space. I lurch forward instinctively.

I bat away the palm fronds in front of my face, trying to pinpoint where exactly the sound came from. I think it came from the back hallway, her bedroom or bathroom. I dodge around an impossible tree trunk. The ground is a mat of moss that squelches with every step I take, ferns litter the landscape, filling in the gaps between trees thick, squat bushes make it nearly impossible to walk in a straight line. I trip and yank and elbow my way through the room.

The hallway is even worse, the narrower space made for a tight weaving of branches and leaves and vines. I push through as well as I can, scraping my arms and legs in the process. A particularly vicious branch cuts my cheek and I can feel a slow trickle of blood start.

I hear the sound again, guttural and pained.

The door to the bathroom is open, the inside dark. I shove in.

The smell of rich, overturned earth hits my nose. The foliage is denser in here, claustrophobic and interwoven. I can barely see anything with the sliver of light from the entrance of the hallway but I can feel the way branches press in all around me, interlocking into a web. Every step I take my foot is caught up in long, grabbing grasses and spongy moss.

I have to feel around, looking for the small counter I know rests against the opposite wall. I should be able to navigate the apartment in my sleep and yet it feels like the bathroom has been stretched to the size of a football field. As branches whip across my face all I can think about is the sickening sound I heard.

I slip and bang my knee on the moss-covered tile. My low “fuck” prompts a guttural hissing noise from my right. It sounds like air escaping from a punctured stomach. It peters out as quickly as it started up, being choked off with a wet gurgle.

I give up walking, my concern outweighing my dignity, and start crawling. It’s easier to push through like this, using my skull like a battering ram to force my way through the thicket. I’m collecting more and more thin scratches all over my body, I can feel the knees of my jeans getting soggy, the fabric clinging to my skin.

I run my head right into the side of the bathtub. The pain rattles down to my neck and shoulders, but it’s quickly overtaken by the horrible, rattling groan that comes from the basin. My hands slip and slide on the porcelain, run into leaves and branches of plants growing right beside me over and over. There is nothing growing on the tub itself.

Desperately scrabbling, I throw my whole upper body over the lip. The room is spinning a little, or I assume. The pitch black technically looks all the same, but the mild nausea seems to indicate that my head is still feeling the sharp crack I gave it. The gurgling continues. The smell has turned from damp soil to sewage, metallic, earthy, disgusting.

My hand hits flesh. It’s slippery. The gurgling is right in my ear. There’s cloth. It feels wet.

I try to reach for the face, I need to know if it’s my sister. In my panic I’m convinced I could recognize her from the pads of my fingers alone. My hand hits something solid. Something woody, bark rough and abrading. Roots like tentacles dig into the breathing body in my sister’s bathtub. The back of my throat tastes like bile, I can feel saliva dripping down where my lips are parted. I want to scream, I can’t move.

The gurgle cuts off abruptly. The corpse stops breathing, my fingers reanimate on their own. I hit the face, feel the long, loose hair. The nose, the brow bone, the cheeks, sunken and pliable. I feel a chain around her neck, I scrabble to feel if there’s a charm.